Cherrie Yu is a 26 year old artist born in Xi’an, China. She is currently based in Chicago, IL. Her films and performances have shown at Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Links Hall and Arts Club of Chicago, Trestle Gallery, Helena Anrather Gallery, and Wassaic Project in New York, and Chengdu Times Museum in China. She has been an artist in residence at ACRE Residency, Contemporary Calgary Museum, Monson Arts, and a visiting artist at Emory University. She is the awardee of the 2021 Kala Art Institute Media Award Fellowship, and will be an artist in residence at Yaddo Foundation in 2022. She is currently an artist in residence at McColl Center in North Carolina, and a visiting artist at the Visual Art department at UNCC.
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My works are ontological inquiries in the form of film, video and choreography. In my short videos, 15 seconds of a wrestling match were re-performed in the middle of traffic in downtown Chicago; a routine from the ballet Swan Lake was transcribed onto four pairs of corndogs. Through translation and reenactment, my work explores how the mundane and the spectacular often disguise as each other. In the past three years I started involving other people more actively in my work, from famous choreographers who now only exist in archival footages, to strangers I encounter on the street of Chicago. A large part of my practice before the pandemic happened on the train, walking down the street, talking to people I do not know. The labor of art, for me, is the desire to communicate and the process of making meaning from shared time.